Can Television Destroy Diet Culture?

This year marks the 100th anniversary of diet culture as we know it. Compared to the span of human activity and the arc of civilization, the propagation of the idea that fatness should be shaming is a relative blip on the historical calendar. Yes, diets have been around for millennia. St. Augustine of Hippo dieted. Lord Byron dieted. But diet culture itself—the widespread dissemination of the idea that bodies (specifically female ones) have a civic duty and moral imperative to reduce themselves, with tips for doing so—has its origins in 1918.

That year, Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters, a U.C. Berkeley-trained physician published Diet and Health: With Key to the Calories. In the book, Peters explained the concept of the calorie for the first time. She decried fatness as unpatriotic, declaring that it was “a crime” to hoard food, “a valuable commodity,” by storing vast quantities of it on one’s person in the form of excess weight. She drew comical doodles of blob-shaped people next to stick figures, and cartoon coffins awaiting the obese. She offered regimented diet plans. And she encouraged dieters to fine themselves if they failed to lose weight and donate the money to the Red Cross. “How any one can want to be anything but thin is beyond my intelligence,” Peters wrote. Diet and Health sold two million copies over the next two decades. Diet culture was born.

I thought about Peters’s drawings while watching Dietland, Marti Noxon’s AMC series about a reclusive woman named Plum who learns, over the course of 10 episodes, how to reject the world’s conception of her and her body. One of the ways that Dietland conveys Plum’s sense of self-worth is by portraying her in cartoon form, a circular figure shrouded from head to toe in black wearing a downcast, mournful …read more

Two killed in hippo attacks in Kenya Credits MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP/Getty Images Alt Text Two people have been killed in separate hippo attacks in Kenya Chinese tourist mauled by a hippo while trying to take a photograph One-Minute Read Monday, August 13, 2018 - 6:26am Two people have been killed in separate hippopotamus attacks in Kenya, according to local officials. A Chinese tourist, identified as 66-year-old Chang Ming Chuang, was reportedly attempting to photograph a hippopotamus at a wildlife resort on Lake Naivasha, 90km (56 miles) north-west of the capital, Nairobi. See related El Salvador outraged by brutal killing of hippo Gustavito Witnesses say the tourist got too…

We pitted Ben & Jerry’s new… Ben & Jerry's released a low-calorie ice cream line in early 2018. The low-calorie Ben & Jerry's ice cream competes directly with Halo Top, a trendy ice cream company that sells low-calorie flavors and was the top-selling ice cream brand in American grocery stores last year. We tried a pint of low-calorie ice cream from each brand and found that one was clearly better than the other. Halo Top offering low-calorie ice cream was one of the trendy brand's biggest assets in competing against more established ice cream companies like Ben & Jerry's. But Ben & Jerry's is responding to…

The most surprising foods Weight Watchers considers… Weight Watchers has long assigned a point system to foods for dieters. The idea is to encourage people to stay away from less healthy items, like a slice of cake, by making those account for more of a person's daily food-intake total. Foods that are perfectly healthy to eat in abundance, on the other hand, get a low point value. According to the the weight-loss giant's rubric, some vegetables have always counted for zero points. But now Weight Watchers says dieters need not count points anymore when it comes to many other fruits, veggies, and nutrient-rich proteins. In December, Weight…